Portrait of a Young Man

In Florence in the first years of the 1500s, a young sitter was often painted in just this way, half-length in a dark cap, against a landscape of hills and water. It was a shared formula, and it is one reason this small panel, 30 centimetres high, spent so long under the wrong name. The Borghese inventory of 1833 described it as a portrait of Raphael painted by Timoteo Viti, an artist from Urbino. The youth's features and black cap do recall Raphael's self-portrait in the Uffizi, and the Borghese owns a copy of that picture, so the two were easily muddled. Other catalogues tried the school of Perugino. In 1891 the art historian Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle proposed Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, and later scholars have agreed with him.